Status 2.0
Overview
This double-award winning installation project won the Tutors Choice DMD'09 Award, as well as the prestigious Swamp at Brahm Sh! Award 2009.
The piece attempts to portray the emotional state of the internet at any one time by taking a social network feed and translating the digital signal into an analogue output. Motors control the intensity of coloured bulbs within each box, using the RGB colour format that is usually associated with the web to provide a huge range of possible colours.
The Brief
As this was a personal project undertaken for the final year Digital Media Design course at Huddersfield University, there was no specific brief. Instead we were encouraged to spend around 8 months researching and designing something connected with an area of interest to us. What!? Creative Partner Chris Kemm chose to explore the way that emotions are expressed online through social media and Web 2.0 websites such as Twitter.
His personal brief was to create a large physical installation utilising both new and classical technologies to display the emotional state of the Internet at any given time. This would be by use of colours which are psychologically representative of a selection of emotions.
What We Delivered
- Physical Installation (watch the video)
- Website (status2.org)
- Book
- Promo business cards
Our Strategy
We created every element of this installation from start to finish. We programmed the Arduino boards and used Processing to run the computer-side code, built the boxes and fitted all the electronics to control each of the bulbs, as well as building the website, shooting a time-lapse video, designing business cards, and printing a book for promotional purposes. Phew!
We approached this in a very strategic and methodical manner. To begin with we experimented with PHP code, scanning the public feed from Twiter for specific words. The idea behind this was to gauge the 'mood' of the network based on keywords contained in the messages. After a little while we began to think about the best ways to visualise this 'mood', deciding that colour was probably the most organic and interesting option. Then, following a lot of detailed research into colour psychology and emotion, we built an experimental website that changed colour based on the words that cropped up the most.
This provided the platform to move the installation into something much bigger and more interesting. One of the original ideas behind the project was to convey a digital signal in an analogue format, which at this stage started to feed back into the project and lead us onto using analogue electronics (stepper motors and dimmer switches) to create the final piece.
Status 2.0 comprised of 3 x 1m² light boxes, constructed using a white linen fabric stretched over a wooden frame. Inside each box were three bulbs, one red (R), one green (G), and one blue (B), which were controlled by Arduino I/O boards that were hooked up a laptop running Processing. The final part to the installation was a projector that projected the live tweets across the boxes as they beautifully faded from one colour to another.